Please join us on Wednesday 10^th June as NESTA hosts a seminar on investment readiness for social enterprises in the UK.

The seminar will cover the latest developments in this new field, explore barriers to better provision and provide opportunities to feed directly into the design of the new Social Enterprises Access to Investment (SEATI) programme from NESTA and The Office of the Third Sector.

Background:
Risk capital supply for social enterprises is increasingly being addressed by investment in new and emerging specialised risk capital funds.  However, while social enterprises can increasingly benefit from a wide range of financial products they are not always able to access the finance appropriate for them.  Professional, tailored, quality support is required to support demand - enabling ambitious, high growth businesses to access and utilise this investment effectively. 

The Office of the Third  and NESTA have recognised that services of this type are not widely available or delivered with any consistency in the UK.  SEATI is a pilot programme specifically aimed to tackle one of the barriers – lack of access to income to cover the costs of IR inputs.

The overarching aim of the initiative will be to find ways for social enterprises to gain the advice and support they need to access new forms of growth finance. The pilot will develop and test a number of key principles and design approaches including using success fees (based on deal size) matched by fund providers which we are inviting your feedback on through this seminar.  We expect the SEATI programme to be operational by the end of July 2009.

This seminar is the first step to exploring some of these issues, considering and developing solutions with a variety of stakeholders including investors, funders, investment readiness providers, risk capital intermediaries and social enterprises. 

Agenda